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Thursday, July 19, 2012

Winston Churchill–A True Hero

After decades of playing bad golf, a good friend, Charlie Pickford, said he had decided to take a professional lesson. By this time he was well into his fifties and the chances of any real improvement were slim, but he always liked the game, perhaps more from the ‘good walk spoiled’ aspect – the lush fairway carpets, the manicured greens, the bright, well-groomed sand traps; the brooks, streams, and ponds, and the warm New England sunshine.

In any case, after only a few swings, the golf pro at the Fair Meadows Country Club diagnosed why my friend had such a murderous slice.

“Start to take your swing”, he said. “Then at the top of the arc, stop.”

My friend took his stance, adjusted his shoulders, feet and legs, brought the driver high up over his head, and stopped just before he would have swung down at the ball.

“Who’s your biggest hero?”, the pro asked.

“Winston Churchill”, Charlie replied without a second’s hesitation.

“Well, there he is behind you. Look over your right shoulder”.

The exercise was to teach an important lesson in the dynamic of the golf swing – the positioning of the body, arm, shoulder, and head at a crucial point. From there on the swing should take on a fluid and strong movement.

Charlie's Winston Churchill response was easy. For years he had admired this brilliant man – adventurer, soldier hero, national leader, visionary politician, and prolific and heralded writer. Who else could have fought as a common soldier in three wars, led his country to victory over the Nazis, stirred the nation and the world with soaring oratory, foreseen the closing of the Iron Curtain and the demonic spread of Communism, and written one of the most comprehensive histories of Great Britain ever written?

His other hero was Sir Richard Francis Burton who, like Churchill was an adventurer, writer, soldier and a man of extraordinary courage. Burton was a geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He spoke 29 languages so well that with his uncanny observation of culture he could pass for an Arab, an Indian, or an Afghan. He successfully disguised himself as a Pashtun and his perfect accent, demeanor, and knowledge of local customs allowed him to be only the second European to gain access to the holiest of shrines in Mecca.

Burton's best-known achievements include travelling in disguise to Mecca, an unexpurgated translation of One Thousand and One Nights, bringing the Kama Sutra to publication in English, and journeying to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. He was a prolific and erudite author and wrote numerous books and scholarly articles about subjects including human behavior, travel, falconry, fencing, sexual practices and ethnography. A unique feature of his books is the copious footnotes and appendices containing remarkable observations and information.

He was a captain in the army of the East India Company, serving in India (and later, briefly, in the Crimean War). Following this, he was engaged by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa and led an expedition guided by the locals and was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. In later life, he served as British consul in Fernando Po, Santos, and finally, Trieste. (Wikipedia)

Charlie was in awe of men like Churchill and Burton, and he felt that the modern age had no one like them. Churchill especially was a remarkable man. Who can forget the image of Churchill, Charlie reminded me, top hat, cigar, wainscot, overcoat and bowtie walking through the ruins of a bombed out London? "I can still hear the scratchy recording of Churchill’s famous WWII speech which did more than anything rally the British people against an evil invader", he said.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Of all of the qualities of Churchill (and Burton) that Charlie admired, bravery stood out:

Bravery was a constant throughout Churchill’s long, eventful life. D’Este notes that “long before he became a statesman,” he “was first a soldier.” The young Churchill, with his miserable childhood and miserable personality, chose military service as a way to make his name and prove himself worthy — especially to his cold and distant father. As a young man, he fought in India and was almost killed.

In 1898 he fought under Kitchener at Omdurman and barely escaped death again. Then he fought in the Boer War, where he was captured and escaped. In World War I he served as first lord of the Admiralty, but after the failure of his plan to force open the Dardanelles, which led to the death of thousands of British and Allied soldiers at Gallipoli, he had himself assigned to fight alongside such men in the bloody trenches of Flanders. (Robert Kagan in the New York Times, reviewing Carlos D’Este’s biography of Churchill 11.08)

It was this bravery in defense of this country, said D’Este, which helped form the patriotism and sense of duty during his service as Prime Minister in WWII:

He was a soldier, a “warlord,” a warrior-statesman in the mold of Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Oliver Cromwell or his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough (Kagan)

Churchill used his understanding of history (his History of the English-Speaking Peoples was begun in 1937) and his battlefield experiences to correctly predict the course of modern events. Kagan continues:

In political exile following World War I, he warned of the rise of dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the Soviet Union, so much so that his critics, who did not want to think anymore about great confrontations, called him a warmonger. When he denounced the agreement reached at Munich in 1938, he warned that there could “never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power.”

Churchill understood that Hitler could never permit an independent Britain, which would always threaten Germany’s control of the Continent, and would use peace only to gather strength for a final assault.

Churchill was turned out of office in 1945 in an election which favored the Labor Party. Despite his heroism, the British electorate felt that Labor would do a better job of rebuilding the country and effected needed political and economic reforms. The glory of Empire was fading in the minds of the British, and they were turning inwards.

Nevertheless, the British were lucky to have such a great man as leader during perhaps the most crucial years of their history:

Like Lincoln, Churchill saw the importance of bolstering public morale, and he understood how deadly it was to talk of peace deals when the nation was losing. “We shall go on and we shall fight it out,” he declared. “And if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.” No one doubted him when he promised to die with pistol in hand fighting the Nazis in the streets of London.

These were the qualities that made Britons choose him over other men, and to follow him in a desperate struggle against the greatest odds. Margot Asquith, describing why people looked to him for leadership, observed that it was not his mind or judgment they respected. “It is, of course, his courage and color — his amazing mixture of industry and enterprise. . . . He never shirks, hedges or protects himself. . . . He takes huge risks. He is at his very best just now; when others are shriveled with grief — apprehensive . . . and self-conscious morally, Winston is intrepid, valorous, passionately keen and sympathetic.” He may have longed “to be in the trenches” and was “a born soldier,” but it was not as a soldier that the world needed him.

In a recent biography of Churchill, Peter Clarke focuses on his writing, and in a review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement Geoffrey Wheatcroft comments on Churchill’s extraordinary ‘prolificity and precocity’. As Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames once remarked “The thing you have to remember is, he was a journalist”. Not only was he a journalist, but a war correspondent, and even before his career as a soldier, he was part of battle:

In 1895,before Churchill turned twenty-one, the 4th Hussars had tolerantly given him leave to go to Cuba where he witnessed the patriotic rebellion against Spain, and he paid for the trip with his first newspaper commission, from the Daily Graphic.

Two years later, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 found him on leave again, in England. “On the lawns of Goodwood in lovely weather” he heard the riveting news that a “field force” was being raised under the improbably named General Sir Bindon Blood, to subdue the unruly Afghan tribesmen (a good deal of Churchill’s early life does have an eerily premonitory ring more than a hundred years later). He rushed back to India, having secured a contract from the Daily Telegraph, an adventure which provided enough copy for his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force.

By the time it was published in 1898, Churchill had wangled his way on to one more expeditionary force which Kitchener was leading up the Nile, switching in true freelance spirit to the Morning Post, and producing another book. The Sudan was followed by the Boer War, which he covered for the Morning Post at the age of twenty-four.

In later years he wrote a biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a history of WWI, The World Crisis, a biography of the Duke of Marlborough, and his above-mentioned History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
Churchill’s journalism and books were lucrative and the fees and royalties financed his political career. It is historical writing which has received the most criticism in recent times – not objective enough say modern historians:

“Give me the facts, Ashley, and I will twist them the way I want to suit my argument”, he had once said, doubtless meaning to shock, and he later said of The Second World War that “It is not history, it is my case”. So were all his books: his case for his father, and for Marlborough and for himself. Clarke quotes the damning verdict of Robin Prior in Churchill’s “World Crisis” as History: “The reader is never sure that the version given by Churchill is complete, or if material damaging to the case Churchill is building up has been omitted, or if any deletions made have been indicated in the text”

Yet Churchill himself was quite aware that he was writing more than just history but an apologia for Great Britain. It is not surprising that he wrote in this way. His passionate patriotism, belief in country and empire, and full understanding and respect for the power, sweep and importance of Britain since the days of the Romans could never be disguised or hidden. His histories were as eloquent as his wartime speeches. If they omitted the facts that a modern historian would have kept in for the sake of objectivity, they were elegiac works, resoundingly reaffirming Britain’s greatness, and for that they will be remembered.

For Churchill, the past was never a foreign country, and they did not do things differently there: King Alfred, Marlborough, Chatham and Washington were his contemporaries, who surely thought and felt as he did.

This subjectivity is anathema to the modern historian who often ignorantly carp at Shakespeare for distorting the facts. Churchill was more concerned with actual historical events than Shakespeare and his work is definitely more fact than drama or tragedy; and yet at the same time he was as concerned as the playwright with the human strengths, weakness, and foibles (especially strengths) which underlie history. Of course he understood King Alfred, Marlborough and the rest – they had to be like him, and they most certainly were patriotic, brave, if not heroic.

“Rarely can an author’s writings have received less attention than those of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953”, Clarke observes at the outset. It is idle to ask whether Churchill deserved the prize: like the outrageous praise showered on him at the time, especially in the American press, and with none more fulsome than Isaiah Berlin, it was the mood of the age. Today we can view those writings with more detachment. Churchill was a born storyteller, and an unashamed exponent of what Giovanni Giolitti called “beautiful national legends”; at one extraordinary moment in history, his faith in such legends helped save civilization.

In recent years, the Politically Correct Establishment has branded Churchill a pariah because of this long, persistent, and immutable defense of Empire. Whether it was the Roman, British, or Spanish Empire, it brought Western Civilization to the undeveloped parts of the world. Churchill never flinched from this conviction, believing that the legacy of the Greeks carried on throughout the history of Europe and later America was worth preserving. If the British benefited from the wealth and treasures of India, they gave India Anglo-Saxon law and administration. They left India with the foundations for a modern society. He was reluctant to let go to this colonial tradition because he believed that the countries demanding independence were not ready, and that Britain could still provide the investment and guidance necessary for their eventual evolution into free states. Many critics look at Africa and say that the colonial abandonment was indeed premature, and that a more gradual, determined, and progressive turnover might have been more appropriate.

Rejecting Churchill out of hand because of this defense of empire is revisionist history at its worst. He grew up in the Age of Empire and within a 19th century moral and ethical world. His absolute belief in the destiny of Britain which helped motivate the country to resist Hitler’s onslaughts and to ultimately defeat him was the same belief that was behind his defense of empire. His extraordinary perspicacity failed him at the moment of independence – he could not see that the colonial era’s time had indeed come – but that should not be held against him. For most of his long life, his solid, honest, and committed beliefs were important for Britain, for Europe, and for the world. He will always be Charlie's and my hero.